“Every battle is won, before it is fought.”
(From “The Art Of War” by Sun Tzu)
I talked in a previous post about the dangers of complacency and underestimating the difficulty of a marketing project.
Pete Godfrey, in his latest “Emotional Ad Writing And Marketing Letter” mentions the case of a pair of marketers who planned to hold a high priced seminar in January and were going to launch the campaign only in mid-December. Crazy, right? But I’ve come across similar situations myself.
And even supposed experts make the same mistake. In mid 2007 one high profile marketing “Guru” launched a seminar only 3 weeks out. It looked like it was a great seminar but it flopped badly in terms of the numbers attending. There’s also the recent example of the John Carlton seminar. When I look back at my emails, he only announced it about 10 days before the auction for the places was going to close.
Getting “bums on seats” and people to show up for a seminar usually takes a lot of work. If you don’t already have a receptive list, the task is even more difficult. Depending on the market and the price point, you’re normally looking at a 3-6 month campaign for a high-priced seminar.
Even for the “lead generation” type seminars that are lower cost (or even free), you need to market them strongly. Remember the classic advice that you need to “sell” your free offers as hard as your paid products. For people to turn up to any kind of seminar, they have to commit time and usually some expense. So, you need to give them a very good reason why they should turn up.
And this applies not just to seminars but to any marketing campaign. The quote from Sun Tzu at the start of this post is as relevant to marketing as it is to warfare. Proper planning and preparation is no guarantee of success in marketing, but some campaigns are doomed to failure right from the start.
Experienced marketers and copywriters can tell with a high degree of accuracy if a campaign is likely to fail. Yes, there is a “secret” and there’s no way I’m going to reveal it on this blog! It’s extraordinarily valuable and that’s part of what I get paid for. As a copywriter, before you take on any project I’d suggest you need to make a cool assessment of whether or not it’s going to be a success.
Sometimes, the most valuable service you can provide for a client is preventing them going ahead with a misconceived project.
Yes, I know that as business people we’re normally pushed for time and almost always have to make some sort of compromises. However, we also have to deal with the world as it is and, more importantly, people as they are.
More about that in a future post.
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